Ryan Lee Price's Blog Posts

f your wheel bolts are original, go to your car, pull one out and take a look at it (just one!): It's a simple threaded iron bolt likely covered in what appears to be a thick layer of dirt and/or grease. Upon closer inspection, the dirt and grease...

As students return to school this month from a long summer off, around 30 million of them will do so on a school bus as part of the largest transportation system in the country. And not only is that school bus yellow, but it is the exact same hue of yellow...

Story and photography by Ryan Lee Price
It’s a bright and fresh Saturday morning and there’s no better feeling than being under the hood of a car doing some regular maintenance or tackling that long-procrastinated project. Whether you’re...

Story and photography by Ryan Lee Price
There are many ways to tell if you need to replace the shocks on your car or truck. They wear out over time and the older they get the higher the likelihood of them failing completely. If your car has excessive...

“ As to the riding qualities of the Jeep, a chiropractor should be standard for each car. ” —Charles “Harry” Payne
The Jeep is ubiquitous as America itself. It has been to battle, to camp, to the highest mountain and the...

By Ryan Lee Price We measure tire pressure in pounds per square inch, engine displacement on modern cars in liters, while gas comes in gallons. Speedometers show both miles per hour and kilometers per hour, and the majority of U.S.-made vehicles contain...

Story and Photography by Ryan Lee Price
Strip a thread? Break off a bolt head? Nothing can halt a project on its heels quicker than a broken bolt or fastener, stripped nut or rounded off capscrew. The weakest point of any design is where two pieces...

Story and Photography by Ryan Lee Price Since Ford ’s introduction of the Pinto engine in the ’70s and Cadillac’s badging of the 1970 Eldorado as an 8.2L engine, the use of the metric system has become more prevalent in domestic vehicles...

The story of how BMW began is as confusing as any story about a major company’s initial development (see Cadillac’s early history ), made even more so by the language and business practices of another country. BMW’s emergence involved...

How to Repair Your Ornithopter - Chilton and the 50th Anniversary of Frank Herbert’s Dune
Story by Ryan Lee Price
In an era when character development and plot structure took a backseat to technological ideas and dystopian/utopian predictions...

The 305 cubic-inch engine in the Koenigsegg One “megacar” is capable of producing 1,360 horsepower from its gas-powered V8, propelling the 1,360-kg car to a top speed of 280 mph in 2.8 seconds. That’s a lot of power, and one can’t help but to imagine...

Cars in Sweden had always been
left-hand drive, and placing the driver away from the center line of the
road led to numerous head-on collisions, especially on narrow
back-country roads. As well, Sweden's neighbors (Norway and
Finland) drive...

By Ryan Lee Price
For Jacob German, Saturday, May 20, 1899, began like any other. He donned his uniform, unplugged his electric taxicab and started collecting fares for the Electric Vehicle Company in New York City. For unrecorded reasons...

By Ryan Lee Price
If you roll down through this history of the tire, most of names associated with
its development are ubiquitous with the tire industry today: Charles Goodyear
first vulcanized rubber in 1844; John Dunlop developed...

By Ryan Lee Price
Up until 1900 in Massachusetts, there were no laws governing the rules of the roads for any type of traffic—carriages, wagons, pedestrians—especially for the burgeoning numbers of automobiles. Not only...

Have you ever walked out of the store to a sea of clones in the parking lot, wondering why your Toyota Camry looks like a Honda Accord, which looks like a Nissan Altima, which looks like an Audi A4? If you remember the good old days of being able to spot...

By Ryan Lee Price
America in 1972 was a drastically different place than it was merely 10 years earlier. A decade at war with no end in sight had taken its toll, as young men became fathers, women became mothers and the idea of hitting...

By Ryan Lee Price
They were called “supercars” or “super compacts” by car writers of the day. It was a fitting term, considering the Y-Body chassis shared by the Buick Special, Oldsmobile F85 and Pontiac Tempest really...

By Ryan Lee Price
Up until 1900 in Massachusetts, there were no laws governing the rules of the roads for any type of traffic—carriages, wagons, pedestrians—especially for the burgeoning numbers of automobiles. Not only...

By Ryan Lee Price
Nothing more evokes invokes the salivary glands of an American gearhead than the term, “muscle car.” The throaty roar of an oversized engine, the smell of rich exhaust and the low-slung slant of a car...

Have you ever walked out of the store to a sea of clones in the parking lot, wondering why your Toyota Camry looks like a Honda Accord, which looks like a Nissan Altima, which looks like an Audi A4? If you remember the good old days of being able to spot...

By Ryan Lee Price
Have you ever pushed your hand through water and noticed the divot you created (and noticed how the water swells up in front of your hand as it moves)? The water attempts to fill in behind your hand, but your hand...

By Ryan Lee Price
Aerodynamics was great for racecars, airplanes and boats, but through the 1910s and 20s, car design was still function over form. Production car designers drew the square-shaped car built on a carriage chassis with...

By Ryan Lee Price
Though the term “aerodynamics” is less than 100 years old, people have been experimenting with the concept for thousands of years. Appearing in Norse legends, a Finnish blacksmith named Ilmienen...

Story and Photography by Ryan Lee Price
So, you’ve got a set of four new tires and you want them wrapped around the wheels that are already on your car. It’s a common situation, but the trouble is your old bald tires; they’re...